When Erika López García traveled to New Zealand during her junior year,
she visited Aoraki/Mount Cook, which at 12,000 feet is the highest peak
in the country. As she marveled at its top covered by snow and its
impressive glaciers, López García says. “All of a sudden I started
thinking, ‘Where else do we see this?’” she says. Could such splendors
exist on other planets as well?

Back at Brown, López García, a geological sciences concentrator,
went looking in the solar system for similar formations. She found one
on a walnut-shaped moon of Saturn called Iapetus, on whose equator runs
a ridge higher than Mount Cook. It is, in fact, almost twice as high as
Mount Everest. It’s also a much colder environment than New Zealand,
with a mean temperature typically greater than minus 300 degrees
Fahrenheit.

Dana Smith

Erika Lópes Garcia, Class of 2014.

The ridge and Mount Cook were similar enough in structure
and climate that López García could theorize how it had formed. She
knew that Aoraki/Mount Cook rose up when tectonic plates beneath the
earth's surface crashed into each other. Did Iapetus’s ridge result
from a similar process? Or not? Scientists had been trying to figure
this out since NASA's Cassini space explorer first discovered it in
2007.

Under the tutelage of her faculty mentor, Assistant Professor of
Geological Sciences Amy Barr Mlinar, López García analyzed photographs
of the Iapetus ridge that Cassini had beamed back to earth. She found
that the angle and structure of the ridge suggested that it was formed
not by the crashing of tectonic plates, as she’d earlier suspected, but
by an exogenous event. She concluded that the ridge was the result of
debris that fell onto the equator after the ancient collapse of the
moon’s ring system. “Iapetus had a catastrophic history,” López García
says, “and the fact that it’s still there is what makes it so
remarkable.”

The work of López García, a mere undergraduate, was impressive enough to interest the scientific journal Icarus,
which in April published a paper on the subject with López García as
lead author. Her findings were also enough of a breakthrough that she
was asked to present it at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
in Texas this past March.

Raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan by her
mother, an immigrant from El Salvador, López García grew up visiting
the city’s American Museum of Natural History, which helped stimulate
her early interest in science. When she was accepted into Brown, she
was the first generation of her family to attend college. Her mother’s
reaction to her plan to study planetary geology, she says, was: “What?
How are you going to get the money?”

But López García did get the money. Her research was funded by a Mellon
Mays Fellowship, which aims to get more students of color to pursue
doctorates in subjects where they are underrepresented. López García
also says her mother soon got used to the idea of her becoming a
scientist and proved enthusiastically supportive. “When I go home,”
says López García, “she asks me all these questions and tries to really
understand what I'm saying, even though most of it goes over her head.”

Next year, López García will work in a research lab at the
University of Texas at Austin and plans eventually to earn a PhD in
planetary geology. “There's just so many things in science that remain
unanswered,” she says. “There's always a puzzle you can try and solve.”

Comments (4)

06/13/14

There are so many talented young minds out there ...congratulations Erika on your achievements ... Many more to discover...

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

06/13/14

Well done Erika, wish you all the best.

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

06/26/14

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Rumble, companero Erika, rumble!

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

06/27/14

"Nelson Mandela, put it this way CompaÃ±ero Erika: âYour playing small doesnât save the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people wonât feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.â

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it